Visioning County Food Production Part Four: Urban Agriculture

This series of articles is an exploration of designs for
agriculture in Tompkins County to approach sustainability in a
future of declining access to the cheap energy and other inputs on
which our industrialized food system relies. In earlier parts of
this series, I proposed principles of agroecosystem design,
addressed the key issues of fertility, energy, water, and pest
control, and pictured the future county food system as a whole,
including its historical context, its implications, and the
interdependencies among the parts that will make them most
effective as an integrated system. I said that providing for the
local food needs of urban populations requires a design that
integrates three overlapping categories of production systems:
urban agriculture systems (many small islands of gardening
in the city center), peri-urban agriculture (larger
production areas on the immediate periphery), and rural
agriculture (feeder farms associated with village-size
population clusters in the hinterland of the city but close enough
to be satellite hamlets).

In this month’s article I will consider the needs and
resources that will shape the design of urban agriculture systems
in the city of Ithaca, and offer a case study as a design
example.

The high institutional and population density of urban areas
promotes labor-intensive production methods, community
regeneration through cooperative management, and transport
efficiency for agricultural inputs and products. The ability to
have more farmers per acre permits the kind of
management-intensive system that maximizes productivity through
close monitoring and good timing throughout the growing
season. Increased headcount allows a division of labor to manage
diversified production integrated into one system. One neighbor
could grow rabbits (Figure 1) and provide manure and meat while
another grows vegetables and a third concentrates on fruits.

Figure 1. Urban rabbit hutches in Cuba

The abundance of city institutions presents opportunities to
build gardening appendages on existing social structures organized
for other purposes. In the sudden energy shortage that transformed
Cuba’s agriculture, schools, workplaces, and even
governmental institutions were quick to become partly
self-sufficient in food production. As awareness builds that
gardening is a form of physical education whose value increases
relative to, say, football, schools will see the need to devote
more playground space to school gardens.

Intensive Design

The high productivity of urban agriculture has proven itself in
many cities, notably in the severe food crisis that Cuban cities
experienced in the 1990s.[1] Productivity in urban agriculture
comes in great part from intensive design and management. The
greater labor required for intensive production is potentially
available in urban agriculture and can make it highly productive
in several ways. Space can be used more efficiently than in
extensive row cropping. Intensive growers can plant many
vegetables in permanent beds instead of rows, minimizing walk or
machine alleys between rows and concentrating soil building in the
beds rather than the whole field. Also, farmers can plant crops of
fast maturing foods, like salad or cooking greens, in spaces
between large, slower maturing ones like broccoli. This practice
of planting so-called catch crops makes more intensive use of
limited space during the growing season. Tiered design that uses
light efficiently is possible. Crops can be grown in companion
polycultures to trade ecological services; legumes like pole beans
fixing nitrogen for the corn that provides the pole, or a row of
peas climbing a wall while fertilizing a row of carrots. Maximum
use and close management of protective devices like frames and
cloches permit not only season extension but also more effective
temperature and moisture control of plant growth during the
regular season. Finally, the consumers of urban-grown food are
close enough to permit effective recycling of nutrients into the
garden soil via backyard compost piles and composting toilets,
partially or totally eliminating the need for space for compost
crops.

For these reasons, urban spaces can be nearly 15 times more
productive than rural farms.[2] In World War II, residential
“Victory gardens” in the US produced a quantity of
fresh vegetables equal to the total commercial output of these
foods.

The Ithaca Urban Environment

Ithaca’s topography of central flatlands surrounded by
steep hills presents distinctive opportunities and constraints for
urban garden design in each area. Josh Dolan’s map of
current and potential community and school garden sites in
Tompkins County illustrates some of the possibilities.[3]

Figure 2. Community and School Gardens of Tompkins County. Blue
= community gardens; yellow = school and educational gardens;
green = farmers’ markets; light blue = sites that have
expressed an interest in gardens or have been identified as
potential sites for new community gardens. Click or see link in footnote
for more detail

On the hillsides, some food production will require terracing,
but the many south and west facing retaining walls and house walls
in residential neighborhoods on Ithaca’s steep hills provide
opportunities for vertical growing. This will maximize use of
space, which is important in urban gardens. Vine plants can
sometimes grow either from the top of the wall down or from the
bottom up. Twine or poles laid against the walls help plants like
tomatoes and beans get a grip going up, and planks or slates
shoved between wall stones support heavy fruits like melons or
squash as they grow bigger.

Projections of climate change for the Northeast include a 20 to
30 percent increase in winter precipitation over this century, but
hotter summers when water is needed for growing, suggesting a
greater need for seasonal water capture.[4]

The hills of Ithaca have great potential for gravity irrigation
if water is distributed downhill through many residential
gardens. Pools at each site can store water to provide gravity
irrigation to terraces via berms and swales. Institutional sites
might justify tapping this gravity flow to power small grain mills
or electric generators.

On the city’s flatlands, current uses of many commercial
sites will become obsolete in the energy descent. Energy
inefficient businesses and parking lots will become prime sites
for takeover by guerilla gardeners, building pressure for
legalization. Water is relatively abundant in our environment, but
because of its importance for highly productive food growing,
water reserves collected from roof drains into garden-side
irrigation pools will be vital to build resilience into urban
production systems[5]. More resilience can be achieved by routing
roof water into attic or upper story tanks for household use and
then channeling the overflow into irrigation pools.

Visioning an urban agriculture case

A group of neighbors has decided to form a loose gardening
cooperative, because a pooled effort will solve the core
production problems of fertility, water, pest control, and energy
more efficiently than would completely individual projects as well
as promoting the sharing of equipment and pooling of knowledge. In
individual backyards they have been growing a few vegetables and
fruits, often in containers they can bring inside for extended
season growing[6]. Many neighbors have enough small stock such as
rabbits, chickens, and pigeons to process organic kitchen garbage;
however, their yards are mostly too small for the amount of food
they want to produce as a co-op.

The neighborhood group has agreed to devote most backyard space
to compost production and the collection of irrigation water for
the co-op. They have quietly attached composting toilets to their
houses and built filter/digesters for household greywater and
little ponds to store greywater and roof water, while currying
support for legalization when the time is politically
ripe. Eventually the city created property ownership and lease
contracts with management agreements that provide incentives for
ecological management, like composting of residential waste
streams and maintenance of food perennials on the property.

To make space for the main garden the neighborhood co-op razed
a building abandoned as too costly to renovate for energy
efficiency, and depaved an adjacent parking lot that became
obsolete when the city got serious about public
transportation. The land owners were happy to lend the properties
in long-term agreements because the city had created land tax
credits for land lent for urban agriculture. As in the
urbanization of agriculture in Cuba (Figure 3), our neighborhood
co-op often left rubble in place and created raised beds over it
with soil imported from nearby rural farms and compost from
backyard and municipal production sites. This photo also
illustrates the use of a pest insect trap crop of corn planted at
the end of the raised beds containing other crops.

Figure 3. Urban coop garden, Pinar del Rio, Cuba

The co-op employs a master gardener to design and manage the
garden to include the polycultures, rotations of crops among beds,
water, compost, and mulch acquisition and application that will
maximize the health of the system. Because it integrates a greater
diversity of crops and habitats, this system achieves a higher
level of sustainability than community gardening by individual
allotment. Each household is assigned responsibility for working a
section of the garden under the direction of the manager. As
different crops or polyculture combinations rotate through each
section, all neighbors gradually have become skilled at growing
all the foods that the co-op produces. The manager arranges for
extra labor when necessary, as in planting and harvesting, for
compost and water from backyard ponds, and for supplemental
compost from the city’s public composting enterprise.

The project design includes a number of elements not yet found
in many urban gardens: hot and cold frames and nursery beds to
feed transplants into the garden; glass bed covers to provide
season extension; habitats for beneficials and other native
species; insectaries, bird houses and trap and repellent crops for
pest control; border hedges of nut and fruit bushes and trees and
other perennial crops; and artistic corners in which to rest and
enjoy the garden.

The neighborhood co-op provides regular shares of harvests to
its members, and sells surplus produce in a market stand on site
using the local county currency. Some members operate small
processing enterprises to preserve co-op output for the
neighborhood.

This model of urban agriculture may work in a number of
locations, but many other models will be needed that are adapted
to conditions of specific sites or parts of the city.

[1] Murphy, Catherine. 1999.Cultivating Havana: Urban
Agriculture and Food Security in the Years of Crisis.
Development Report Number 12. Food First: Institute for Food and
Development Policy.http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/devreps/dr12.pdf

Some time in the next 30 years, life will start to become very different from what it is now. By mid-century we will use much less energy; we will live every aspect of our life much closer to home; and we will be much poorer in material terms, because energy and wealth are basically the same thing in an industrial society.

Energy descent — a radical reduction in our use of energy — is certain, but it’s not clear yet which of several factors will cause it to begin. Perhaps we will decide to do the right thing about climate change and reduce our CO2 emissions 80 or 90 percent, which would require changes almost that large in our actual consumption of energy. And there are other ways we might experience a radical reduction in our use of energy; for example, economic collapse, or an expanded war in the middle east. But the factor that makes energy descent a sure thing and sets the theme for this century is "peak oil" — the leveling off of global oil production and then its eventual and inexorable decline.

The timing of the peak is debatable, with forecasts ranging from 2005 (that is, already here) to 2030. But most credible estimates agree with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which concluded in a recent study that "world oil production is at or near its peak," and with the director of research at OPEC, who said recently that "we are at, or near, the production peak of world oil, if not on the downward slope."

After the peak, the growing gap between falling world oil production and ever-increasing global demand will send prices skyward, with economic results that can only be imagined but will certainly include greatly restricted mobility due to the high cost of fuel and much higher prices for most goods, including food. The result will be less disposable income, a life lived closer to home, and a greater reliance on the goods and services that can be provided locally. Since the supply of oil and other fossil fuels is finite, this outcome is guaranteed. The only question is, Shall we plan for what we can see coming, or just let it happen to us?

A group of area citizens, TCLocal, has begun planning now. TCLocal contributors are committed to researching various aspects of energy descent in Tompkins County and writing up a preliminary plan for each aspect based on purely local challenges and resources. This is one such plan.